The 15th edition of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF), held this May, reaffirmed its enduring commitment to politically engaged nonfiction Asian cinema, showcasing a diverse program that spanned recently restored historical works and groundbreaking contemporary films. Since its inception in 1998, a pivotal decade after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan, TIDF has served as a crucial platform for independent voices and alternative narratives, distinguishing itself by championing regional Asian cinema with a specific focus on social and political discourse. This year’s festival continued that tradition, presenting an array of films that meticulously explored themes of identity, historical memory, political struggle, urban transformation, and the complex process of healing in post-conflict societies.
A Legacy of Critical Inquiry and Archival Revelation
The Taiwan International Documentary Festival emerged during a particularly dynamic period for documentary filmmaking in the island nation. The late 1990s witnessed a surge in independent video activism and the proliferation of new community media models, pointing towards innovative structures for production and distribution that challenged traditional media landscapes. Unlike many global film festivals, TIDF—alongside the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, founded in 1989—carved out a niche for politically engaged nonfiction, particularly emphasizing its Asian Visions Competition and a dedicated Taiwan Competition strand. This strategic focus has allowed TIDF to consistently foreground narratives that often remain underrepresented, offering a vital counter-narrative to dominant historical accounts.
Among the most revelatory screenings at the 15th TIDF was Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024), a meticulously compiled 30-minute work from TV newsreel outtakes by the acclaimed Taiwanese photographer Chang Chao-tang. This film delves into the astonishing true story of Suniuo, an Indigenous Amis Taiwanese soldier who, drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, was dispatched to the Indonesian island of Morotai. Miraculously discovered in the jungle 30 years later, living in complete isolation and unaware that the war had ended, Suniuo’s return in 1974 became a global sensation. Upon his repatriation, he was assigned the Mandarin name Li Guang-hui, reflecting his integration into Taiwanese society.
The film documents Suniuo’s highly mediated public appearances, from press interviews with his family preceding their reunion to the grand spectacle of his homecoming, and finally to his battle with lung cancer, which led to his death in 1979. Chang Chao-tang, then working as a photojournalist for the China Television Company (CTV) between 1975 and 1979, deliberately limited the footage to these public moments. Crucially, while the film includes original narration by news reporters, it notably lacks any direct utterance from Suniuo himself.
The Weight of a Nation’s Narrative
Suniuo’s extraordinary story was swiftly co-opted and reframed within the Kuomintang (KMT) government’s nationalist narrative, which sought to emphasize the Republic of China’s triumph over the Japanese empire. He was recast as a national hero who had valiantly resisted and escaped the Japanese Imperial Army, despite some historical accounts suggesting he might have deserted as the tide of war turned against Japan. This heroic narrative served to consolidate a nascent national identity in post-war Taiwan, positioning Suniuo as a potent symbol for the "new Taiwan."
Chang Chao-tang’s directorial approach subtly critiques this co-option. His close-ups linger on Suniuo’s face during numerous staged ceremonies, most strikingly during a sequence where the renowned Taiwanese folk singer Chen Da serenades Suniuo with a Ulyssean epic of return. What initially appears as contemplation on Suniuo’s face gradually transforms into an expression of profound incomprehension as he listens to a Mandarin folk song, a language and tradition utterly alien to his Indigenous Amis heritage. Chang’s deliberate refusal to impose a new voiceover, combined with the cumulative power of associative montage, crafts a fragmentary portrait of a man whose private trauma is subsumed by a historical narrative he played no part in writing. This poignant artistic choice highlights the disjunction between the public spectacle and the individual’s lived experience, questioning the very act of national myth-making.
Historically, Archive: Li Guang-hui holds significant weight. Chang never screened the film publicly during his lifetime; it remained in his private archives until donated to the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI) by his son following Chang’s death in 2024. The film challenges the long-standing claim that Taiwanese documentary filmmaking only truly emerged after the end of martial law in 1987. Chang Chao-tang, also celebrated at TIDF in 2018 for his diaristic 8mm films—catalyzed by the avant-garde postwar Taiwanese periodical Theatre Quarterly (劇場) which encouraged youth-led artistic movements—is revealed at a crossroads between his experimental shorts and his photojournalistic work. This newly unearthed gem pushes the boundaries of established historical narratives surrounding Taiwanese cinema, demonstrating that politically and artistically engaged nonfiction existed even under restrictive regimes.
Unearthing Suppressed Histories and Contested Identities
The festival’s archival programs, "Reel Taiwan" (focusing on social movements of the 1980s) and "War Memories, Shifting Identities" (exploring conscripted Taiwanese soldiers during the Japanese colonial period), collectively reconsider the hybridity of Taiwanese identity. These programs illuminate how Taiwanese identity has been shaped through cycles of colonial subjugation and various modes of collective resistance. By foregrounding the island’s often-contested relationship to the Sinocentric world, its long-suppressed Indigenous Amis and Tayal histories, and its broader archipelagic connections across the Pacific and with the United States, TIDF actively challenges monolithic narratives.
A prime example is Asia Is One (1973) by the leftist collective NDU. This film skillfully stitches together diverse testimonies from postwar Taiwanese fishermen in Okinawa, Zainichi Okinawan miners on mainland Japan, and rural villagers from Tayal communities in Taiwan. It meticulously limns their varying relationships to Japanese colonialism—some expressing critical perspectives, others demonstrating loyalty or nostalgia. The expansive motif of the sea, continually traversed by these seasonal laborers, serves as a powerful metaphor, revealing the inherent heterogeneity of East Asia, an entity perpetually pulled between competing forces of territorializing nationalisms.
This archival focus on local histories resonates deeply with contemporary global struggles. As Taiwan’s self-governance faces increasing precariousness—often framed through the competing imperial interests of the U.S. and China—the festival’s attention to these nuanced historical layers offers a defiantly prismatic view of the island’s identity. This commitment to anti-imperial solidarity was further underscored by the program "Palestine and Its Archiveless Archive," which framed solidarity with Palestine as part of a broader continuum of anti-colonial resistance.
Contemporary Echoes: Urbanization and Resistance
Many films in the TIDF program centered on the stark confrontations between individuals and the relentless march of predatory urban development. A poignant example is Hu Sanshou’s Xiangzidian Village: The Stage (2026). Across its 150-minute runtime, the film meticulously documents the gradual transformation of earth and grass into crushed rock, dust, and ultimately the flattened grey expanse of a highway. Paradoxically, this highway becomes a stage upon which generations of village life continue to unfold.
Unlike his previous film, Resurrection (2025), where he directly interviewed villagers, Hu Sanshou adopts a more distanced and reflective approach in Xiangzidian Village: The Stage. Assuming the role of storyteller through voiceover, he presents vignettes of individual villagers against sustained wide shots that visually bind each subject to their rapidly changing environment. They appear dwarfed by vast hills, mounds of rock, and bulldozers that loom like new, imposing gods. Hu consistently refers to his subjects in terms of their familial relations—"that is the aunt, uncle, cousin, wife of so-and-so"—underscoring the intimate, interconnected fabric of community life. Despite the formal distance, the film gleans its profound emotional force from Hu’s personal relationship to his subjects; the villagers who once watched him grow up are now the ones he quietly observes growing old. Each individual is portrayed as the center of an entire universe, held together by gingerly interlocking webs, all taking the stage for the final act of their displacement and adaptation.
In an era saturated with independent Chinese documentaries offering a cinéma vérité glimpse into the lives of the marginalized for a global audience, Hu’s film feels distinctly patient. Filmed over six years, it subtly mourns each elder who has passed away during the production process. The film’s only close-up, during its coda, delicately pans across the villagers as they watch one of Hu’s previous films during his father’s funeral, their faces lighting up with bursts of recognition and wonder. This scene encapsulates the film’s quiet power: finding resilience and endurance in the specific textures of physical and emotional worlds, where others might perceive only failure or passivity.
Narratives of Unresolved Trauma: The Red Shirts Massacre
Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Narrative (2026) circles the complex quagmire at the heart of contemporary political cinema. The film stages a theatrical workshop with family members of the Red Shirts pro-democracy activists who were killed in Bangkok during the 2010 massacre, a significant and traumatic event in recent Thai political history. Suwichakornpong structures the film according to three abstract workshop exercises, mimicking a conventional three-act narrative. Act one involves participants describing a memory corresponding to a primal emotion without explicitly naming it. Act two features a discussion with a lawyer mediating a conversation about the future of their legal action. Act three asks participants to describe an experience for which they feel thankful.
This codified narrative structure deliberately exposes how stories of trauma are often shaped for public consumption: suffering followed by a resolution, a format that can assuage any feeling of guilt on the part of the spectator. Most suggestively, during the final act, Eiko Ishibashi’s evocative score overrides the dialogue, rendering the participants’ words inaudible precisely at the moment the film asks them to articulate gratitude. This powerful artistic choice highlights the inherent difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding conventional "gratitude" or "closure" when justice remains elusive.
During act two, the participants discuss their fifteen-year pursuit of justice. The 2010 inquest treated each death as an isolated case, rather than as part of a collective tragedy. Families were thus sent on an exhausting, fragmented chase across different military units in search of individual soldiers, effectively disaggregating violence enacted on a mass scale to prevent any comprehensive reckoning with the military state as a whole. By comparing how Thai law disaggregates a collective case to how popular representations of political trauma often center individual testimonies, Narrative exposes the profound impossibility of individual healing without collective restitution. Suwichakornpong, however, troubles the rigidity of her own imposed structure by interspersing workshop scenes with intimate glimpses into the participants’ everyday lives, taking them out of the sterile brightness of the studio and back into the intimate rituals of mourning. A mother retrieves a notebook filled with dreams of her son, a deeply affective sequence that draws the viewer back to the root of the struggle. By returning to the workshops—which themselves form part of the research for Suwichakornpong’s forthcoming courtroom drama, Fiction—the filmmaker considers both the veracities and the potential falsehoods of testimony, exploring how its tenderness has been called upon within therapeutic, legal, and filmic frameworks.
The Exhausted Metropolis: Post-Pandemic Reflections
Perhaps the most memorable film of the festival similarly upended any notion of resolution, transforming its own premise into an ouroboric, Beckettian walkaround. Luo Li’s Air Base (2025), by the Canada-based Chinese filmmaker, is set in Wuhan in 2023, as the city slowly and warily returns to a new form of public life after the pandemic. Described by some as a city symphony, the film more accurately portrays the metropolis as a stage for a motley crew of performers engaged in seemingly futile, repetitive actions. A man pretends to be a traffic operator from an overpass; a young woman collects recordings of sighs from passersby; two men fish unsuccessfully in a manmade pond; another man divides fallen autumn leaves into symmetrical piles atop city bikes or attempts to straighten public bus curtains.
These staged sequences evoke the intrigue of early 2000s prank shows by provoking unscripted public reactions. Pedestrians mostly obey the traffic commands; passersby treat the young woman with suspicion, refusing to sigh as it is perceived as a "pessimistic" and "ungrateful" action. The man attempting to "fix" the city’s asymmetries ultimately accomplishes nothing. Even a broom takes center stage, constantly falling on an ascending escalator, with people gingerly stepping over it, watching its Sisyphean descent but doing little to intervene. These motifs recur throughout the film, spiraling into a sense of "limp time"—a suspended duration without end, stripped of narrative propulsion. Such reactions capture the stark nature of interpersonal relationships in the present: a pervasive sense that no one bears responsibility for another, and each person acquiesces to authority with shrugs of apathy. Reality, as depicted, is not merely tired; it is exhausted.
Despite the proliferation of repeated empty gestures in Air Base, the film’s profound force lies in the accumulation of these public responses. Repeated conversations by the lake may not yield fish, but they produce a strange form of camaraderie. Occasionally, some people sigh without prompting, a gesture revealing an exhausted mind that nonetheless refuses to admit complete defeat. These films, far from collapsing with exhaustion, re-perform it across new permutations, finding peculiar, prickly forms that bend around the edges of the possible, still imagining what comes after all that we have already seen before.
The 15th Taiwan International Documentary Festival thus solidified its position as a vital cultural institution, adept at both excavating historical truths and navigating the complexities of contemporary Asian societies. Through its diverse programming and critical curatorial vision, TIDF continues to challenge established narratives, amplify marginalized voices, and foster a deeper understanding of the region’s multifaceted identities and ongoing struggles. The festival’s unpretentious yet deeply resonant films, which often mediate real-life horrors with a certain distance, ultimately offer a testament to resilience and endurance, even in the face of profound systemic challenges.
